Riel Hilario's Installations

Apr 29 - May 5, 2012
Riel Hilario

Satellites

Apr 11 - Apr 25, 2012
Allan Balisi

Reverse Déjå Vu and Memory as Verb

In Chris Marker’s seminal science fiction short film La Jetee, a man  is told to arm himself from the potentially maddening effects of traveling back in time with a fragment of memory condensed into a single image so dense and ferocious and incendiary, he could hook himself onto it as if it were a lifeline. An elegant conceit, all told.

Similarly, Allan Balisi’s preoccupation with memory has both directly and elliptically addressed the density of memory encoded in a single image, but without misconstruing constancy as an absolute quality, knowing rather, and all too well, that memories are quintessentially protean and skittish and fallible, and that sometimes they can not be trusted, but also that there is energy for tapping in that mistrust, and possibly a certain measure of truth. This is not memory as nostalgia, neither is it exactly memory as history, but more memory as verb, the idea of remembering as re-creating.

Satellites is haunted by the inaccuracy and the mutability of memory, and energized by the flaws and holes that come out of it, and the possibilities of new codes and new shapes.  They’re like rogue transmissions from decrepit satellites, compromised by interference and faulty wiring and in the process becoming something else, like memories that alter states after being besieged by a spurt of amnesia.

Balisi culls the images mostly from science fiction and crime films but filtered through what he remembers of them, and prone to the confusion of his own decoding, to the lapses of his own remembering, painting them as if they were fluctuating signals, gaining this temporal urgency in the process, this sense of being suspended simultaneously in all three timelines, becoming more mysterious and evocative for it. Strikingly more minimalist than his usual work and leeched of color, there’s a fragmentary sensation to the work,  as if Balisi were besieged by spurts of amnesia himself, as if he were groping his way in, minding the gaps, teasing the silences, sifting for clues, decrypting the codes. As if, like us, he’s never been here before.

It’s a kind of reverse déjà vu, if you will, a phenomenon common to anthropologists, and possibly to time travelers. If déjà vu is the remembering of something you haven’t experienced before then vuja de is the forgetting of something you’ve been through and re-experiencing it as if for the first time.

-Dodo Dayao

Reboot

Apr 11 - Apr 25, 2012
Angelo Tabije

Re to Boot

After Minikaniko ni Moniko ang Makina ni Monika, Angelo Tabije’s 2^nd solo exhibition, Reboot, reaffirms the artist’s preferred vernacular with works that moniker most graphically, man’s eventual transmutation into a creature of a mechanical sociology- no less inspired by the rows of auto-repair shops, metal fabricators, small factories and the indispensable communal cottage industries in his suburban hometown in Montalban. 

The iconography-cum-allegory set in the genre of science fiction, deftly takes on a social commentary: Man in his primal dependence on the performance of his tools has morphed with the machine; the once mustering symbol of industry and progress now feeding on the lifeblood of its host.  As collateral consequence to the narrative, Tabije reveals the anatomy of this hybrid amidst a Martian wasteland; Man the Machine and his physical and/or psychic submission to a routine of manufactured subsistence, certainly after his own design, and ultimately subject to its own depletion.

The invitation to ‘reboot’ may well be Tabije’s subliminal call to probe and re-evaluate the constructs of the human condition and revert to a less automated, more idyllic pace. Of the four paintings, one work which the artist has entitled ‘Upwelling’, is at once antithetical to the rest in its diametric pairing of a biomechanical head of a child with that of the iconic image of “mother nature”, and subversive in the visceral exposure of the female creature’s arboreal metamorphosis. The organic nostalgia endures in this demonstration of the Gaia hypothesis in the form of a woman-tree; quite buoyant in anticipation of precipitating clouds, her genesis- taking root on a bodiless orb especially adorned with paper pinwheels, poised to catch the next tropical breeze.